Month: September 2016

Oh well – I had high hopes. I was so excited to see my ‘name in lights’ after entering my first ever writing competition – however small the competition was.

Why did I think I had a hope in hell of winning, or running up or shortlisting? Who knows? It comes to mind, that this is somewhat how the contestants in X Factor or Pop Idol, Australia’s Got Talent and so forth, feel. Somebody has told them they’re great singers, dancers, comedians, etc and they believed it. They’re good! More than good; they’re sensational! 🙂

And while I didn’t necessarily have a posse of arse-lickers telling me how wonderful my fiction writing was – I was happily confident that they were great! 😀

Anyhoo (as my daughter would say) I didn’t make the short-list and upon reading the winning entries, I can see why. I write plain.

And coincidentally, in the last few days I’d been thinking that already – I dream in full technicolour, with fantastical story lines and characters, and movement between worlds and bigger than life adventures. Yes, they generally present in logical order too; which isn’t the case for everyone, as I understand it.

However, when I write – I write as my personality is; plain, straightforward, logical and pedantic (?). Yes, the stories make sense; yes they have a beginning, middle and end and spelling is excellent and the characters believable. But is there ‘life’ to the stories? Are they too much ‘in the box’ and not ‘outside the square’?

I can see upon re-reading of my two short stories where I lacked. And number 1 was that I wrote them and sent them off, without editing/rewriting! 🙂

So, congratulations to the two winners! See the link below to read the winning stories and the 10 shortlisted items also and see which ones you liked the best. I enjoyed the 2nd winner AND the story about the engineer and the swimming pool tickled my quirky bone! 😀

Remember the rules were: Character of your own creation, using the words umbrella, softly and birthday with fewer than 149 words. And crime themed; the character had to have committed some sort of crime (big or small). Read my previous article Murder & Mayhem, to read my entries.

It is SO exciting. Ordered back in May 2015, I missed out on the first round of orders and therefore it meant a wait of more than a year. And luckily I’m a patient girl (and trusting) because when you spend several hundred dollars on an item and you don’t get your hot little hands on it for many months, it does cross your mind “Hmm, is this is a scam?” It wasn’t!

The idea of the Freewrite is that you write – without social media-type distractions, write without editing (computers allow you to edit as you go and therefore can derail you from the ‘actual’ writing). This is a modern-day ‘word processing’ tool; solely for writing.

The keyboard; ah, delight! It has those large, deep keys of olden day electronic typewriters, that tangible sensation of keying in words and the ‘click-clack’ soundtrack. Heavenly!

It sounds romantic (and actually I feel it is romantic) to say that writing on a typewriter is so much better than on a modern keyboard, with a soulless screen in front of you. There’s a sensuousness; a connection that you don’t get in front of a computer.

The Freewrite is a weighty machine for its size, but that appears to be a positive as with a rugged aluminum body, it doesn’t feel fragile.

Oh and the Freewrite has an e-ink screen (like a Kindle) so you can use in bright light – sit outside under a tree or alfresco at your favourite cafe – and clearly see what you’re writing; oh, and it is portable. Doesn’t have a carry‑case, but has a handle and off you go!

The Freewrite saves as you go – first to its own memory storage and then when you switch on the Wi-Fi – to the cloud. Freewrite uses Postbox and you can then sync your writing to any other cloud service you may be using – such as Evernote, Dropbox or Google Drive. You can be offline to write and then switch back to online to upload your work.

As I mentioned previously, this ‘writing’ tool discourages you from wasting time editing an ongoing piece of work – because you can’t edit. You can back space – but there isn’t a delete key. There are no cursor keys, so you can’t navigate back to a mistype, spelling mistake or a sentence or paragraph you’d like to retype! You can do that later – and so your synced writing can then be downloaded to a standard word processing program and prettied up – editing and adding photos, if required.

So when the finished version of this short article is uploaded to my WordPress blog – there will be a photo of my Freewrite sitting on my writer’s desk. Right now, of course, I can only contribute the words.

It is so exciting; I can’t believe how exciting it is. I have a deadline for the coursework I’m completing at the moment – and I need to be finished in time for National Novel Writing Month #nanowrimo in November – but NO! I want to play with my new toy; I mean write!

Out go my old IBM electronic typewriters – this compact unit replaces them. Not their romanticism, but their heft, reliance on accessories (ribbons, golf balls) electricity and space – and their lack of portability. You have been replaced, my dears!

Come National Novel Writing Month this November – my next 80,000 words will be written on this gorgeous machine.

I’ll let you know further down the track how I’m going with it – and if the love affair continues.